by Cole Morton I’m not a wronged diva. I’m right to feel rejected by hurtful Booker judges
Author Edna O’Brien is well into her 80s – but there is no sign of her spark fading as she opens up about award snub
EDNA O’Brien is furious. The veteran novelist has written a novel that many critics consider her masterpiece, the crowning glory of a long life, but the judges of the Man Booker Prize have chosen to ignore it. ‘I am inflamed,’ says the author of The Little Red Chairs in her deep voice, sitting straight-backed in the library of her home near London’s Sloane Square, choosing her words very carefully but with an obvious anger. ‘I was surprised not to be included and one day I might learn why.’
With those low, controlled tones and the way she tilts her head, O’Brien sounds strangely like an Irish Margaret Thatcher. She’d really hate that, as a lifelong Labour voter, but imagine Thatcher as a bookish bohemian from Tuamgraney, Co. Clare, in a long, pleated skirt, a black knitted top and with bright turquoise beads at her throat. ‘These were made by Native Americans.’
Now 86, she still has the fine features and quick mind that dazzled Richard Burton and Marlon Brando in the Seventies, when she was a famously fiery feminist, breaking taboos with her rollocking, beautifully written stories about how real women felt about life, love and sex.
She reaches for a volume that quotes her friend, the late Samuel Beckett, and reads the words with relish as if they are a curse on the Booker judges. ‘Let me say before I go any further, that I forgive nobody. I wish them all an atrocious life and then the fires and ice of hell.’
Then a slow, wicked smile creeps across her face, because although O’Brien is righteous in her anger, she is also making mischief. She has nothing to prove, this woman the critics have recently elevated to a place among the greatest writers of all time, comparing her with Joyce and Solzhenitsyn. The American literary giant Philip Roth declares her ‘the most gifted woman now writing in English’.
A new generation of readers has been transfixed by The Little Red Chairs, a story about a notorious war criminal fetching up in disguise as a healer in an Irish village and capturing the heart of a lonely local woman until he is found out.
Based on the real-life ‘Butcher of Bosnia’, Radovan Karadzic, The Little Red Chairs feels hugely topical at a time when millions are on the run from war. Yet it was not on the longlist for the Man Booker announced in late July. ‘It’s too easy to say there is a feeling of rejection, because of course there is,’ says O’Brien. ‘It was an omission that I did not expect and neither did many people. Other authors and publishers have confirmed that to me, so I’m not behaving as the wronged diva.’
As a former Booker judge herself, O’Brien is sure of her own talent and willing to say so. ‘I am not going to be the modest violet about that. I work so hard, so passionately, so relentlessly on the words. There are many good writers. I happen to be one of them.’ We both laugh but it’s true. ‘These things hurt and inflame but sweet are the uses of adversity – they do not stop one writing. No way!’
So now she is working on a new novel, the plot of which she will not describe, because then it would lose its power, as dear old Sam Beckett used to say. The Dublin-born author of Waiting For Godot was a fellow exile ,who once sat at the foot of her bed in a hotel in Paris saying little, waiting for her to recover from the effects of her one and only trip on LSD, which had been given to her by therapist RD Laing.
The life of Edna O’Brien has been full of such extraordinary moments. Her debut novel The Country Girls was banned and burned in Ireland in 1960 for being immoral in its description of teenagers leaving their village – as she had – for the big city. It was a huge hit overseas, though. Some of her early books were made into films, including Zee & Co in 1972, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Caine, and O’Brien fell in with the movie crowd. ‘I was a country gal who by accident, chance, luck and my own vivid personality entered into a world of glamour. I was the one who was giving the parties, and everyone came.’ Jane Fonda was a friend, Judy Garland dropped in to one of the Saturday-night revelries at her home. ‘Very famous people were quite different then – they were not surrounded by bodyguards in dark glasses. They were not as pretentious.’ She had married and given birth to sons but was on her way to divorce by then. The Hollywood star Robert Mitchum came to visit her alone and danced in the parlour to her favourite records. ‘We danced all the way up the stairs to the tiny bedroom,’ she wrote in her autobiography from 2012, Country Girl. Marlon Brando came to see her too – ‘his whole being taut, like an animal, ready to spring’ – but they stayed up all night talking instead of making love. Before leaving in the morning he asked: ‘Are you a great writer?’ She answered: ‘I intend to be.’ Richard Burton was hurt when she turned down his advances but, like Brando, she saw him as ‘a bard and a brother’ rather than a lover. Paul McCartney dropped by and sat in her kitchen playing the guitar for her boys Sasha and Carlo and making up a song on the spot: ‘Edna O’Brien, she’ll have you sighing, she’ll have you crying, hey, she’ll blow your mind away...’ But then she had a dream about throwing burning oil over all the people who came to her parties and stopped them immediately. ‘I began to feel they were drawing out my working, serious, ruminative, writing self,’ she says now. ‘It was seeping away from me.’ She has worked very hard ever since, producing a total of 17 novels to date, as well as biographies of Byron and Joyce and collections of short stories. Faber is putting out new editions of her early work, with the novel August Is A Wicked Month next in line.
‘At 86 I should be putting my feet up but that ain’t the mathematics of life!’
First published in 1965 and banned in several countries, it is described as ‘a simmering tale of a woman rediscovering herself on the French Riviera’. The book was used against her in the battle for custody of her sons, when the court was told it was ‘indecent and obscene’. She won custody anyway. By the end of the Seventies she was an outspoken political figure too, commentating on the Troubles and women’s rights and more than holding her own against Robin Day and Michael Foot on the first-ever BBC Question Time in 1979.
She delved into international politics with The Little Red Chairs, going to see Karadzic on trial in The Hague and interviewing many survivors of conflict. But couldn’t Edna O’Brien put her feet up now? ‘I think I should be putting my feet up but that ain’t the mathematics of life! I live by my writing. I have no other money. I rent this place. I’ve never had a fortune. I never got the big money. Those windfalls never came my way and that does at times infuriate me, yes.’
As 90 looms, does she think about the end of her life? ‘I do, yes, because I’m alone. I have children but they have their wives and their children. I think about death, often. Sometimes with great anxiety and apprehension, which isn’t the actual death itself but a long illness and helplessness and a dependency and I ask, “On whom can I depend?”’
She is ‘ambiguous’ about the possibility of life after death but does know where she will be laid to rest. ‘My grave is on an island in Co. Clare, in a graveyard where my mother’s family are buried. The walls of the monastery ruins are bleached with big medallions of white lichen. So it’s very stark and beautiful. Water birds and sky birds, wheeling in and out. I think about it as if I am alive after death, seeing it all and writing about it. That’s a rather happy thought.’
She has plans for her own funeral to include music by Van Morrison, and I notice a signed copy of his album Moondance on a rack.
‘I’d like it to be a good show but not too long, as if it was a party I was giving. Full of life, full of generosity.’
Not yet, though, because O’Brien is off to the Edinburgh Festival to talk about The Little Red Chairs.
‘I’m very glad I’m a writer. I wouldn’t be anything else. If I were born again I’d like an income though.’ There’s that wicked smile again. She’s a hoot and she knows it, a dry wit with a gleam in her eye.
‘I was born in the year of the horse, 1930. A horse just keeps going until it falls down and dies.’
Edna O’Brien intends to keep on going like that horse, whether she is shunned by the Booker judges or showered with praise.
‘I thank God and the gods for the talent I have been given and I thank my mother for my perseverance, otherwise I would have given up at 40 or 50 or 60,’ says this wise, witty, salty voice that still has so much to say. ‘Never give up!’
The Little Red Chairs is out now, priced €11.70
‘I never got the big money. Those windfalls never came my way and it infuriates me at times’